Friday, August 5, 2016

People taking pictures of people taking pictures...

Our lives have turned into a great big rectal examination, but the funny thing is this: It's the assholes who are wielding the cameras.

At Parliament Square today, I watched two young women, early twenties. They spent half an hour taking pictures of their dog.

We were surrounded by Gandhi, Churchill, Lloyd George, a 160 year old clock, a great sense of ticking history, and all they could do was snap pictures of fucking Fido.

And it was the same picture, over and over again: Dog panting. Dog drooling. Dog panting. More drool.

A procession of Japanese cameramen stomped across the square. The Bataan Death March, with Nikons and Canons. Tripods snapped out. Wait for the bell to strike two pm. Click-click, clickety-click. Stomp off somewhere else. The changing of the guard. Tora! Tora! Tora!

When you get old(er) there's two things you don't do. You don't let people take pictures of you, and you never, ever look in a magnifying shaving mirror.

Saturday, July 9, 2016

could be an old Irish lament, the sort of thing your drunk uncle launches into as he wobbles beside the casket holding your dearly departed Granny.

It is in fact a much sadder affair. The box in question is a fibre-optic cabinet capable of delivering blistering internet speeds to the denizens of rural Ireland, and it is the last of its breed on the twisting road into darkest Kilkenny.

Minister for Communications, Denis Naughten, recently announced that the pitiful distribution of this essential utility is to be handled by the private sector, delivering a fifty percent reduction in governmental costs.

Fucking great, Dinny. We all know how wonderful something is when you get it for half-price.

Current speeds in the Dunmore/Ballyfoyle area are under 2MB. To put that in agricultural parlance, it is a stream comparable to that delivered by an old bull with a dodgy prostate.

So, who is leading the bidding to deliver us into this bright new tomorrow? Who else but Eir, formerly Eircom, formerly Telecom Eireann, formerly Posts and Fucking Telegraphs, and formerly Man With A Chisel Carving A Headstone.

The next box you see on the Ballyfoyle Road will be the one I'm carried in.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

I don't hate many words,

but there's one that really manages get
my back up.I lived in France for three years and never once heard the word
'entrepreneur', but this morning, on RTE radio, it burst forth at least forty times.A couple of men were blathering on about the exciting,
challenging, adventurous, lonely and not always properly rewarded,
life of the entrepreneur. They spoke like a couple of battle
hardened soldiers. Their wives understood. Their families made
sacrifices. Such is the life of an Irishman with a career denoted by
a French noun.An entrepreneur is “A person who organizes and manages any
enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable
initiative and risk”.In other words, what we English speakers used to call a fucking businessman.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

The American phone company, T-Mobile, commissioned a survey and discovered that 59% of people would roll up their sleeves and retrieve their smartphone from the toilet.

Of course, the intriguing aspect of that statistic is this: Four out of ten people would walk away and leave it there, twinkling like a sovereign in the Trevi fountain. A quarter of the respondents in the survey said they would fight a thief to get their phone back and 17% admitted they would run blindly, like Wile E. Coyote, into a dark train tunnel for the same purpose. Clearly, some phones are smarter than their owners.

In the 1970's, when you wanted to bring your phone to the pub, it involved a thousand yards of cable, two hundred traffic cones, A JCB and a man with a red flag. If you were going on a pub crawl, you could quadruple that. The plus side of this early technology was that the average telephone was too big to fit down a toilet. In fact, if five or six friends were sitting around a pub table, once they got their phones out, there was hardly ever enough room for the drink. And what about the telephone directories? We had to haul them around as well. Suitcases full of them.

"Jim, did you bring the 045 book with you?"No, I picked up the 051 by mistake"."You're a gobshite. Who do we know in Waterford?""Keep calling me names and you can walk home.""I'll get a taxi"."HaHa! You will not. I'm the one with the Golden Pages. Who's the gobshite now?"

The old big black phone was also a handy defensive weapon; many the head was cracked with a three kilo handset. There was a wicked irony in the fact that the implement used to assault you, was sometimes used to call the ambulance.
And what about dating? You'd ask a woman for her number and then you'd have to walk around all night remembering it. You wouldn't be able to do anything else. People would try to engage you in conversation.
"Stop!" You'd say, "I have a girl in my head and I don't want her to escape."

Your mates would be having great fun and you'd just be standing there, your lips continuously moving in a numeric mumble. Of course, you'd invariably get the number all jumbled and when you'd phone the next day, you'd get the wrong woman and before you knew what was happening, the two of you were married with children.

They were simpler times, if you don't consider the thousand yards of cable that had to be rolled up every night; the traffic cones that had to be collected, the wages for the JCB driver and the man with the red flag...

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Dublin airport at five in the morning...

One immigration official to check one hundred foreign passports. The man in front of me remarks that all the empty security booths remind him of a derelict racecourse, except there is no one to say, "and they're off". Because, of course, we aren't off. We just stand around on the pasture of polished terrazzo, snorting and stamping to keep the circulation moving. In the airport cafe you can get five breakfast items for €7.50, but a couple from Texas wonder aloud if two slices of toast constitute one item. "Yes", says the foreign national behind the counter, clearly in tune with Irish logic, "two is one".

The sun is coming up on Terminal 2. The taxis are pulling up in their droves. The girl at the breakfast counter has decided to try a new approach with a couple of English tourists who want scrambled egg on toast. She puts two slices side by side on the plate and cheerily announces "one-and-one is one".It's good to be home.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

What could possibly entice a couple of hundred people to spend a Sunday morning lining-up, in intense heat and humidity, on a New Jersey sidewalk?

You guessed - The opportunity to pick up a box of chocolate eclairs and watch them melt in the car.'Cake Boss' Buddy Valastro is a star of reality television. Each week, two million people tune in to watch him decorate wedding cakes and fold the almonds into the biscotti mix. The truly dedicated make the pilgrimage to Hoboken to snap pictures of the store and possibly have a 'consultation' with the great man himself. Pilgrims may also get the chance to clap eyes on wife, Lisa; right-hand man Mauro Castano; head baker Joey Faugno; bakery sculptor 'Ralphie Boy' Attanasia and intern Marissa Lopez. Less likely to be squeezing the icing bag on the premises is brother-in-law Remy Gonzalez, now embarking on a nine year stretch for aggravated sexual assault.

Now excuse me, I have to go get a muffin, and there's a seven hour wait.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

One Of A Kind

My mother bought a “strange” full-length fur coat at a tag sale in Hacketstown in March. It has proven to be very controversial.
Of course, she loves creating a bit of a stir. Twenty-five years ago she fell off a balcony at a U2 concert, dressed as Lieut Uhura from Star Trek. (Bono gamely tried to catch her. For his trouble he ended up with three broken ribs and a Phaser wedged so far up the wazoo he had to write a song about it: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.)
People are pointing in the street. The local newspaper has received countless letters of complaint. The coat has driven some to fury, and others to tears, but mother is not in the least upset; in fact, she seems to relish the scorn and the enmity.My sister, Carolina Moon, confronted her on the matter. She asked her, straight up: “Why are you wearing that thing?”“You don’t like it?”“Nobody in town likes it.”My mother nuzzled the coat and laid on her best Zsa Zsa Gabor accent. “Well, I think it’s rather fabulous, dahrlink. What do you not like? Is it the shape?”“It’s not the shape.”“The buttons?”“The buttons are fine.”Mother flounced in front of the mirror and narrowed her eyes, so that she might see a younger reflection. “Does it make me look fat?”“No. That was the children and the chocolate.”Mother seemed genuinely baffled. “I’m confused. So it must be the colour?”“The colour is part of the problem.”“Which one bothers you the most? Is it the black or the white?”At this point, Carolina Moon could take no more; she exploded in rage. “Mother,” she screamed, “Don’t you understand? The coat, it’s panda! PANDA!! P-A-N-D-A!!!“Yes,” replied mother, stroking a sleeve, “and probably virgin too. You know what they’re like. It’s definitely not a reproduction.”Carolina Moon collapsed in a tearful heap on the floor. Mother, whether out of honest hunger or sheer badness (the truth may never be known), went to the local Chinese restaurant, dressed in her best, and, in full view of the horrified locals, ordered a triple portion of bamboo shoots.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

This morning I rode up to the 44th floor, accompanied by the elevator operator and a woman with a dog.

The dog, it's struck me, was extremely well-behaved; it sat primly on the floor and stared straight ahead at the slight gap between the metal doors. Floors whizzed past, blips of light flickered, but the dog didn't blink. We stopped at the 33rd floor. The doors opened and the woman stepped out. She patted her thigh and said, "Here Scorpio. Come." It took a moment for the dog to process the command. Balefully, he looked up at the elevator operator, then me, and then slowly he stepped out to follow his mistress.After the doors closed I looked at the elevator operator and said, "strange dog.""That ain't the half of it, that dog is on Prozac. She told me herself. About six months ago she gets in here and she goes, 'Scorpio is so depressed. He whines all day long. He barks, he whimpers.'"The elevator operator paused long enough for me to take in the image."But all the time I'm thinking, he's a fuckin' dog. This is what fuckin' dogs do. Am I right?"I told him he was right. He went back to imitating the dog owner."Scorpio is vexed. He is vexed all the time. He takes out his anger on the furniture. He eats cushions. He pulls up threads in the carpet. He chews the blinds. He shreds newspapers. He shuns the sand box in the kitchen and urinates everywhere else."The elevator operator stopped the car at the 44th floor, but did not open the doors."All the time I'm thinking...""He's a fuckin' dog?" I suggested."You're right," said the elevator operator, as if the whole fuckin' dog thing had been my idea, "But one day she tells me she's taking him to see a vet on West End Ave. Then I don't see her for maybe a week. When I do see her again, she's got the mutt with the thousand yard stare: Forrest fucking Gump on the end of a lead. She tells me, "Scorpio is on a low dose of 'Reconcile'. Prozac for dogs. You familiar with it?"I told him it was one of the drugs I hadn't tried."It's like a little doggy treat. Poor bastard doesn't even know he's being doped.""Maybe he's happier," I said."Hah! I got a dog. I want to cheer him up, I take him out to the park and get him laid". He laughed like a maniac, and then we agreed that sex in a public place was probably the best medicine. He opened the doors and told me to buzz him when I was leaving, but I was already calculating the health benefits of walking down forty-four flights of stairs.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Two heavyset men meet outside the Starlight Diner.

They give each other a manly hug, grabbing forearms and slapping backs. They look like a couple of grizzly bears frisking each other for salmon. They come into the diner and take a booth nearby. They speak with Western US accents; their conversation goes like this:"If I have a stroke, all bets are off. Remember the time I broke my leg? That cost seventy two hundred dollars.""Should have broken your leg in Canada, heh-heh.""Very funny. I read an article in Time magazine. Don't usually read it. Ultra liberal. Some guy called Joel Stein/Joel Steen.""What was it about?""Social security. He's concerned about our kids.""A liberal is concerned about our kids? Heh-heh.""They'll never see social security. What do you think of the flat tax?""I like the flat tax""I'm in favour of it. Everybody thinks I'm crazy. Everybody I talk to says, don't go there. I believe in the flat tax. We got a flat tax, cash is king"They order two mounds of food. They eat. The check arrives."Okay. We got a check for twenty dollars. I leave ten, you leave ten. I leave a dollar for a tip, you leave a dollar for a tip.""Is that enough?""Cash is king my friend, cash is king."The men leave. A busboy clears the table. The waiter picks up the two single bills and looks at George Washington."Cheap fucking bastards."